“Now we’ve planted our feet in the country and have a branch there,” he announced to a family gathering. “It’s not just Mahmoud who has stayed—the sons and daughters he will have in the future will also remain there!”
At that point, the head of the Dahman family asked him, “Okay, Sheikh Ibrahim, but what if the Jews get hold of him?”
“They’ll go pop,” he replied. “Mahmoud is a thorn in the Jews’ throats!” Sheikh Ibrahim’s eyes filled with tears, for he wished he could have stayed in al-Majdal, or even in Lydda, Ramla, or somewhere else—they were all home in his view. He wished he could have been present at the births of his grandchildren there, one after the other, instead of those who had been born in the camp here, so that the family could get a bigger share of UNRWA rations.
What Sheikh Ibrahim had said became a proverb repeated by others in the family and their children for three generations, as part of their store of oral heritage. When Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in the 1967 War, many of the Dahman family said, “The branch has been reunited with the stem.” The fugitive refugees were the stem, and The Remainer and his children were the branch. Jinin was one of the daughters of the Dahman stem that had not extended southward toward Gaza, but rather in the opposite direction, toward Lydda and Ramla.
I summarized for Jinin in a few lines my impressions of that part of her novel I had read. I asked her not to leave me in suspense, but to send me the rest of it. I told her that I would soon be visiting the country with my wife. I explained that Julie wanted to get to know the Acre that the run-up to the war of 1948 had made it impossible for her to grow up in, when her parents had whisked her away to London at the age of two months. I added that she would be bringing with her some of the ashes of her mother, to place them inside what had been the house of her grandfather Manuel more than sixty years before, as instructed. I expected Jinin to be very pleased, and to be even more pleased at the news of our visit to her in Jaffa with which I concluded my short message.
Jinin soon emailed me a file containing the rest of her novel, except for the final chapter, which she proposed to give me when we met, either in printed form or else in the form of a verbal summary. She said my opinion of what I’d read had reassured her considerably, though it had also surprised her. She told me that from now on she would be preparing herself for possible confrontations with her readers.
I printed out as much of the novel as Jinin had sent, and put it in the small bag that usually stayed on my shoulder when I was traveling.
Then I wrote back to Jinin to thank her, expressing interest in The Remainer and his personality as an actual father, and also in her novel. I told her that I would follow his progress through her novel closely. Most likely that would be during my visit to the country, while Julie would be busy reading Ahdaf Soueif’s novel In the Eye of the Sun, which she’d told me she would take with her, and which she’d started reading some days before. For my part, I might be able to read some more chapters of Filastini Tays. I left the subject of the final chapter of the novel to our anticipated meeting, as she had suggested.
At the end of my email, I suggested to Jinin that we should meet at eleven o’clock on the following Monday—four days later—in Dina’s Café in Jaffa.
13
A Warm Day in Montreal
I had gotten to know Jinin six years previously, during a short stopover she’d made in London on her way to New York. I entertained her for dinner at home on that occasion, in the absence of my wife Julie, who was abroad. News of Mahmoud had been interrupted when exile had cut me off from the homeland and torn me apart. During the evening, Jinin took me back to some of what I had been searching for during my childhood about The Remainer, although she wasn’t able to give much detail to many of the stories.
We were next brought together at an evening gathering (to which Julie was unable to accompany me) at the wedding party of the beautiful Lara, the daughter of our relative Zakariya Dahman, in Montreal, Canada. I accepted Zakariya’s invitation immediately, although I had never met him before and didn’t know much about him, except that he was a relative of ours who had been in Kuwait, where we had a lot of family.
A few hours before leaving London, I received a message from Jinin conveying to me some good impressions of Zakariya and his family, though there was also some disturbing information.
Jinin informed me that Zakariya had worked as a teacher in Kuwait until the First Gulf War in 1991. In August of the same year, Kuwait had been liberated from the Iraqi occupation, which had lasted seven months. “Then,” she wrote, “Kuwait liberated itself from Zakariya
